The change rejects former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s view that messaging about the Chinese Communist Party was linked to anti-Asian hatred.
The State Department quietly overhauled a Biden-era fact sheet containing language on China that partly reflected the previous administration’s fear of inflaming anti-Asian racism. The change reflected a deliberate rejection of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s view that Washington’s policies toward and messaging about the Chinese Communist Party were linked to anti-Asian hatred, two department officials told National Review.
Last Thursday, the department issued an updated fact sheet that summarizes Washington’s relationship with Beijing. One of the changes is that the webpage now refers to the U.S. relationship with “China” instead of with the “People’s Republic of China (PRC).” The updated website also refers to the “Chinese Communist Party,” a phrase that the Biden-era version did not use.
This was a deliberate choice to terminate guidance contained in the August 2021 cable in which then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken told department employees to use “PRC” instead of China or “CCP,” officials told NR. A senior State Department employee said: “It’s new guidance and the end of Blinken’s guidance as well.”
“Part of this was rooted in the belief that would help make a distinction between the ‘Chinese people’ and the ‘Chinese government’ and therefore protect against ‘anti-Asian hate,’” another State Department official said, calling the Biden view “nonsense.”
“We say CCP now in part to show that the Chinese people are ruled by the CCP, a legitimate distinction between government and people,” the second official continued.
The 2021 directive, first reported by NR, allowed diplomats to use CCP when referring to specific offices directly within the Party bureaucracy and to use the label PRC otherwise. Mary Kissel, a former senior State Department official in the first Trump administration, told NR at the time that the document “doesn’t reflect the fact that the party runs the country.” And Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik said it demonstrated that the Biden administration was “pulling its punches on China.”
The same year, Jessica Lee, then a researcher at the Quincy Institute, a think tank funded by progressive foundations, took credit for the Blinken-era State Department’s change. In her writing and activism, Lee had pushed the notion that even the Biden administration’s dovish China policies had encouraged anti-Asian hate incidents. She was appointed to a role with the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs in 2023.
But the updated fact sheet indicates that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a staunch China hawk, will not shy away from highlighting the communist nature of China’s regime.
The updated document previews the strong language that Rubio’s State Department will use while addressing China going forward, stating that the country has worked to “manipulate and subvert international organizations” and that it seeks to “groom and install CCP members in leadership and other positions” within international bodies. The Biden-era document had only noted at the U.N. that the country has become “increasingly assertive.”
The new fact sheet also emphasizes that the U.S. will approach its relations with China “under the principles of reciprocity and fairness,” a shift from the Biden-era version that did not mention these concepts.
Rubio has also taken steps to shore up Taiwan’s international position against Beijing’s attempts to isolate the island country. An additional fact sheet regarding U.S. relations with Taiwan was also updated last week to excise Biden-era language stating that the U.S. does not support Taiwan’s independence.